mith wrote:Newbie Games are off-limits for anything but Mafia flavor. A user's first experience with this site should not be Fuwochichi vs. the Sandwich Army.
Agreed, but do you mean Mafia/Werewolf, or only the mob? Lots of people are introduced to the game through Are You A Werewolf?
mith wrote:There have to be boundaries, and they need to be reasonably well defined - original material based in a common and well-known genre might be ok; Fuwochichi vs. the Sandwich Army, not so much.
I'm hesitant on this one. For instance, is Alien Imposters (The Thing, V, Body Snatchers, etc) a common-and-well-known genre? I'd say yes, but it veers awfully close to encouraging weirdnesses in roles. Maybe we start with one or two additional variants on Infiltrators that could be explicitly used, and expand as needed/approved. The other one that's "out there in the wild" as a card game is
Do You Worship Cthulhu?, though it's pretty rarely used I think.
mith wrote:All flavor should be public (no role PM flavor that could be claimed, for example). That would have to include role names, and I'm not sure whether it would make more sense to say "no flavor in roles, period" or have the option of role name flavor if it's open (i.e. the OP/rules post lists "Alien = Mafia, Space Explorer = Townie, etc." for all possible roles).
At the least, open role PMs should be "translated" into normal flavor - players shouldn't need to parse your treasure hunt flavor to figure out what their role actually does. Having two sets of role PMs isn't particularly elegant or aesthetically pleasing, though.
Mod translation of role/PM on request or in the first posts seems sufficient to me. "No flavor in roles" is really about no game-breaking/twisting flavor in roles, which is a separate problem. I love getting a Mafia PM with a 'backstory' for my Family/Werewolf Clan; drops me right into the mood.
An additional problem with 'translating' roles would be fakeclaims; the mod would have to be careful to say "if the claim is genuine, then that role would be equivalent to a Roleblocker", which I'm not thrilled about.